Five Levers to Learning

Having just finished reading "Five Levers to Improve Learning" (#5Levers) by Tony Frontier and Jim Rickabaugh, I'm in a reflective mindset to connect this new knowledge to make more sense of it. Tony and Jim focus their book on the following five levers:

• Structure - Logistical components of districts, schools, and classrooms, such as schedules, staffing, and administrative processes 
• Sample - Grouping of students in any classroom or program any at given time
• Standards - Expectations for quality and articulated pathways for growth as related to student learning 
• Strategies - The practices teachers use to help students deepen their understanding of content and improve their ability to use important skills 
• Self - Beliefs that teachers and students have about their capacity to be effective 

The structure and sample levers are provided by administrators and district leaders and are the only visible components of their "learning iceberg". The standards, strategies, and conceptualization of self are invisible aspects, though fundamentally important to the learning. 

As a participant in our weekly Standards-Based Learning chat, #sblchat, I know how vital standards or learning outcomes are to our learning journey. We engage daily in lessons or learning opportunities aligned to one or more of our standards. Teachers and students collaboratively engage in sharing practice, feedback, assessing and reassessing until students reach proficiency or higher. As I'm integrating Standards-Based Learning (SBL) with Understanding by Design (UbD) with Trello, I'm creating Course Level learning goals or Big Picture goals, supported by Unit Level learning goals and aligned to Standards-Based learning goals. All learning activities are aligned to standards to reinforce the learning and to facilitate and foster communication, collaboration, critical thinking, and creativity in our Learners. I believe that flow happens more often when our Learners take the Driver's Seat and own their learning through facilitation. They learn so much about themselves and each other when they facilitate rather than leaving the facilitation to just me. 

Some of our learning strategies that appear to solidify understanding and deepen proficiency include having our Learners facilitate, having everyone take ownership for providing feedback, and having everyone engage is self-assessing to determine where we still have gaps. The more our Learners take responsibility for collaborative questioning, providing feedback and reflecting through self-assessing, the deeper our relationships become. Every Learner can contribute to our learning environment and can benefit from our collaborative classroom. All Learners in our environment see feedback as crucial to learning whether it's peers making connections to background knowledge, teachers offering a prompt to guide the learning, or self-assessing that seems to resolve where gaps in learning may still exist. 

I wish to thank Tony and Jim for their careful analysis and sharing of their "Five Levers to Improve Learning". If you've yet to read their book, consider adding it to your reading list.